If you rely on an old-school antenna to get your television fix like a surprising 15% of my fellow Americans—or me during the two weeks it took Cox to get their crap together this summer when I moved to New Orleans—it’s time to get your digital television converter box coupons from the government. While you wait for your coupons and for the boxes to show up at your favorite retailers, use this website to figure out how to get all your free-to-air digital TV with an antenna. Even if you use cable or satellite, I’d consider getting one of the boxes just to have for when your cable or satellite service goes out during your favorite sporting event or other TV show.

Of course, if you want high-definition television (or at least the full benefits thereof, since the coupon boxes will only give you downscaled HDTV at best), you’ll need to just junk the old TV and get a new one.

I consider the Ron Paul is Revolutionary Buzz over at OTB today.

In the real world, via two consecutive days at the movie theater, Three Doors Down + Cinematography = National Guard Recruiting. It has a surprisingly powerful effect on my patriotism gene, maybe just because it’s a pretty good song in its own right. (Heck, I grew up with the national anthem playing before every movie, so maybe it just filled that gap in my life.)

In the fictional world, via Shawn Zehnder Lea: the How to Spot a Cylon poster and the Battlestar Galactica Propaganda Poster Set, the latter of which I think would be fun to hang on the walls of my office.

I realize this is a little late for readers on the East Coast, but Merry Christmas nonetheless!

An event three years in the making: Mike Munger donates his hair to a worthy cause. As someone who has mocked my ex-boss’s coiffure in the past (I believe I referred to it as being the result of excessive use of hair product, but cannot locate the post in question), I have to say I’m impressed with his putting his, er, hair where his mouth is.

Via Henry Farrell and Dan Drezner, I present The Department for your viewing pleasure:

My only observation: it needed more Sunshine Hillygus.

Profgrrrrl demonstrates how to use a spreadsheet program to calculate grades. This seems like the sort of skill that ought to be taught somewhere in the curriculum, but I don’t recall ever being told to use a spreadsheet in school except to calculate basic descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations) for physics labs in college in some DOS version of Quattro Pro.

Of course, I’m the sort of person who grades things with denominators like 15, 45, and 60 and who created 11 nested IF formulas in OpenOffice.org Calc to assign letter grades in my classes this semester, so I’m clearly weird.

Update: Dr. Pion also responds to the initial post that started it all.

Professor Karlson and Dean Anonymous both inveigh against ad hoc extra credit. I make a general policy of only giving extra credit on an “open to all takers” basis, and typically I build into my grading structures things that eliminate the need for extra credit, such as dropping low quiz grades and weighing exams so higher-scoring exams count more in the final average.

Now I just need to figure out the secret to taking attendance without having to deal with the stupid paperwork associated with absences for the spring.

Hulk Hogan will be the king of the Bacchus Mardi Gras krewe next February. Hopefully this won’t interfere with his important duties as co-host of the American Gladiators revival.

Dan Drezner invites professors to submit the worst sentence they’ve seen from a student-written term paper. All of my candidates are in the office this evening, so I’ll have to defer my participation to tomorrow, but I’m sure I have some possibilities lurking around the office.

In fairness, however, most of the essays (and even many of the hastily-written final exams) I read this semester were quite good; I was actually pleasantly surprised, given the horror stories I’d heard from a colleague earlier in the semester.

I predict the nominees at Outside the Beltway today, part of a series from all of the OTB faithful.

As Jeff Licquia notes, CompUSA is getting out of the retail business. Granted, there isn’t a lot of stuff there you can’t find elsewhere, and compared to Newegg it’s not exactly a cheap place to get computer bits, but where else in the New Orleans area can I get a four-pin Y cable for my computer’s internal power supply or an SATA-to-IDE converter?

Not to mention that with Circuit City hemorrhaging money like there’s no tomorrow, sooner rather than later we’ll basically be down to Best Buy and the electronics section of Wal-Mart for those computer parts you just can’t live without for the 2–3 days it takes Newegg to get them here.

When mom and I went to see The Darjeeling Limited, among the previews was one for Juno. Surely a comedy with Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, and Rainn Wilson in it can’t be bad? Mind you, I reserve judgment on Jennifer Garner’s current comedy chops, although she did OK in 13 Going On 30, and I’ve yet to see anything lead actress Ellen Page has been in.

Anyway, I guess the studio really wants to build some buzz for the movie, because they’ve got oodles of free screenings listed on the movie website, even in flyover country (including New Orleans). I’ll certainly take a free ticket for a movie I was planning on seeing anyway, particularly on a night when the competition for my entertainment attention span is the Poulan Weedeater Bowl or whatever reality crap they’ve used to replace everything worth watching Tuesday nights.

For my cyberstalkers, there are recent posts by me at my other blogging home, Outside the Beltway, at which I apparently play the role of the lefty academic—as opposed to here, where I’m generally perceivable as an aloof libertarian/conservative academic, or the classroom, where I just try to be inscrutable, all the better to throw everyone off my trail.

In case New Orleans didn’t have enough damn LSU fans in town, they’ll be out in full force for the BCS title game against Ohio State on January 7th, when thankfully I will be far, far away from the Crescent City.

Who could hate this outcome more than a Michigan fan? Not only does their archrival tOSU play for a national title, but now there’s no way Les Miles backs out of his commitment to stay at LSU instead of going to coach the Wolverines. At least my loyalties will be less conflicted than a Michigander’s: go Buckeyes!

Today’s Woot is the Pinnacle HD Pro Stick; I can attest that I have one of these and it’s pretty cool. Presumably Elgato’s EyeTV, which works really well on my MacBook, is bundled with the Mac version—the PC software is pretty lame, in my experience, but maybe they’ve figured out the crashing problems it had. It also works under Linux with the right patches—not sure if they’ve made it to the latest Linux kernels yet or not.

So, check to see if you can get some HD television over the air, and if you can then pick up one of these babies. If you miss the Woot deal, you can get it (or the more Mac-happy Elgato model that’s basically the same, but lacks an antenna and includes the full version of EyeTV) at Amazon.com instead.

Houston Nutt will be the next coach at Ole Miss. I figured there’d be a much longer process to fill the job; maybe I was projecting from my experiences onto others’. Now hopefully Nutt can get things back on the right track, we don’t lose many recruits and the kids who can go to the NFL stay, and we can go from there.

GWU political science professors David Park, John Sides, and Lee Sigelman have joined the great unwashed masses of political science professors in the blogosphere, sensing a dearth of blogging on American and comparative public opinion and mass political behavior. Welcome to the party!

Orson Swindle on the aftermath of O-for-8’s firing:

This leaves the pesky question of who will take the Ole Miss job. Exquisitely timed as always, Ole Miss has fired a coach just in time to compete against Texas A&M, Michigan, Nebraska, and god knows what other larger, more monied programs will fire their coaches in the next ten minutes–not to mention the vacancies gaping after the guys who fill those positions leave their current positions.

Now I have to find a new tagline for the blog. Here’s a bittersweet final tell ‘em ‘bout it, Joe-Joe! for the road.

Rick Cleveland 1, Ed Orgeron 0. I guess Boone and Khayat think they can turn things around faster with someone else running the show; I’m not that convinced, but maybe they’ve got an ace up their sleeves.

To me, the quasi-obvious candidate is Mike DuBose, who’s quietly turned around the Millsaps football program in what many people have perceived as a stepping-stone job back to I-A. If Mike Price had seen more consistent success at UTEP, he might be on the board as well.

Megan McArdle asks “why is America’s high-speed rail so dreadful?”

I’ll one-up McArdle: why is America’s passenger rail, Acela or not, so dreadful? My answer is that it’s not integrated at all into the broader transportation system—in transportation planning parlance, there’s a lack of intermodal connections.

If I fly from New Orleans to Memphis or Chicago, I can park my car at the airport. When I get there, I can rent a car, or in Chicago I can get on the “L.” If I ride the train… none of the above, although if you wander the streets of Chicago for a few blocks you eventually would get to an “L” station. The only reason the Acela works on the NEC is because Washington, New York, and Boston all have effective mass transit networks that connect the center-city stations to other modes (air, car rental, or parking) in the suburbs.

To make high speed rail—or even higher speed rail—workable in America, it’s going to require that intermodal infrastructure to be in place. Which means, for practical purposes, the sensible course of action is to build the stations where the infrastructure is already there—at airports, which already have rental car locations and parking garages, along with transfers to and from air carriers. If that’s not practical, then convenient connection options between airports and rail are a must.

Update: More on this theme from Tyler Cowen and Stephen Karlson, the latter of whom reminds us that many of the barriers to high-speed operation of existing rail lines are political rather than economic.

I’m pretty sure the last place I’d have expected to see apparent praise for a white supremacist politician like former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith would be at Samizdata. Then again, I’m not used to reading much praise of Smith contemporaries like Ross Barnett, Lester Maddox, and George Wallace from recent writers either, not spending much time surfing the websites of the neo-Confederate fringe.

In Thursday’s New York Times, columnist David Pogue gives a pretty favorable review to Amazon.com’s new e-book reader, the Kindle. Certainly the idea of having a tablet on which I can carry around all the journals and books in my office is pretty darn appealing—if the content were there, for either Amazon’s offering or Sony’s Reader. Thus far, though, the offerings seem to be targeted more to bookworms than people who read hundreds of pages a week because they have to.

I guess a mix of Google Scholar, Google Books, an e-Reader, and affordable access to content—I’m not going to pay good money to read articles and books that I’m entitled to free or inexpensive access to already as an academic researcher—combined with the convenient access to content in Kindle is what I’m looking for. Maybe Amazon can deliver that for academics in the future; until then, I’ll probably be taking a pass.

First it was Noxubee County, now it’s Wilkinson County’s turn to keep the civil rights division of the Justice Department in business:

Three Wilkinson County officials will take the Fifth Amendment if asked to testify in a bizarre election challenge that involves claims of voting irregularities, intimidation and racial overtones in the Democratic primary, an attorney said.

Sheriff Reginald Jackson, Circuit Clerk Mon Cree Allen and Supervisor Richard Hollins went to court to challenge their re-election losses in the Aug. 7 primary.

What makes the case unusual is that the three incumbents wanted a court to decide the matter, but it now appears they don’t want to participate in the hearings that began last week. ...

The incumbents were reportedly losing the Democratic primary when the polls closed. But they were declared winners after paper ballots were counted by a small group of people, including the sheriff’s sister, Easter Prater, the chair of the county’s Democratic Executive Committee.

That’s when accusations began to surface that someone stuffed the ballot boxes.

“We have made allegations of massive fraud regarding the paper ballots,” Piazza told The Associated Press on Saturday. “And now these folks have announced in open court that they are taking the Fifth Amendment.” ...

In a disturbing twist to the story, [Kirk] Smith, the only white candidate in the debacle, has been the victim of a series of tragedies since the primary, Piazza said. Smith’s wife, Donna, was arrested in a courtroom when she disputed the results. She was cleared of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace charges and is suing the deputy, Piazza said. Also, vandals damaged Smith’s construction equipment and his home burned just days later.

“It was definitely an arson,” Smith told the AP.

Wilkinson County is in the extreme southwest corner of the state and has population of about 10,000 — about 70 percent black and 30 percent white.

This is not the first time whites in Mississippi have claimed racial intimidation during an election. A federal judge ruled in June that the Noxubee County Democratic Party in eastern Mississippi violated whites’ voting rights. That was the first time the 1965 Voting Rights Act was used on behalf of whites.

Maybe there’s something in the water in Mississippi’s black belts that causes everyone in power there, white or black, to play dirty tricks with elections.

þ: Rick Hasen.

It appears that our two-teen Uptown robbery spree has come to an end, at least until these twerps make bail.